I just read a very interesting article about what leads to resilience reported by Benedict Carey was in the New York Times (January 3, 2011).
Carey described a study that followed almost 2000 adults over a few years to assess their mental well-being, life events, and resiliency. The authors found that resiliency was related to how often individuals had faced difficult circumstances. They concluded that when we face difficult times, we are forced to develop skills for coping and our support systems, among other things. The more we’ve faced tough times the greater our skill set becomes for getting past them – the more resilient we become.
The same phenomenon can be true for maintaining self-care behaviors, like exercise or meditation, that we desire to do. If we consider the things that prevent us from achieving our goals, like making it to our weekly exercise class or eating certain foods, as circumstances that we need to work through and learn from we can use them to develop the “resiliency muscle” for building lasting behaviors.
Most things in life change and are uncertain. But there is one thing that we can count on: Challenges will never cease to occur to our daily plans and goals. Given this, an essential strategy is to learn how to work with challenges so we can become skilled and more resilient.
This strategy falls under becoming “Respectful” toward ourselves and “Tolerant” of life, in my upcoming book Smart Women Don’t Diet™ . I’ve developed a method for and write about how to become SMART, in other words, learn how to live in Self-caring, Mindful, Autonomous, Respectful, and Tolerant ways.
To become more Respectful and Tolerant it is important to change the frame for how we perceive daily obstacles. I teach my clients how to view obstacles as “challenges to dance with” instead of “barriers that get in our way.” When we consider obstacles as fluid instead of fixed, things to interact with, go through and learn from, we create the context to learn new creative problem solving skills which permits resiliency to develop. In fact, we can and should consider this as a re-training for our brains so that our automatic thinking starts working for, instead of, against us.
While counter-intuitive, in order to develop the necessary resiliency to sustain a behavior for life, we need face these challenges and not achieve what we had planned OFTEN. This becomes our laboratory for investigating what exactly does challenge our plans and permits us to experiment with developing specific strategies and responses that effectively prevent or overcome these challenges, eventually.
Clearly daily challenges to behavior are on a much smaller scale than facing the types of life events investigated in the study above! Yet, with the right frame, they act in a similar way. They help us re-train our habitual responses. They give us opportunities to develop new emotional and cognitive strategies, and a general resiliency, to maintain our motivation and behavior in the face of and through difficulties.
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